Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
How To Select the Best Graduation Quotes
Graduation is a time of great relief for both the graduates and their parents. Many speakers try to capitalize on this atmosphere by delivering memorable messages, leaving people laughing in contemplation with unforgettable graduation quotes.
Being assigned the honour to deliver a speech at someone’s big day can be daunting – but it also offers an opportunity that many will never get again: To inspire and motivate an entire generation as they move into adulthood; creating lifelong memories in one brief moment so stay true to your message!
One noticeable element of the speech is the graduation quote. Searching through the internet, you will find numerous graduation quotes that you are faced with the difficulty of selecting which of them are the best.
Here are some tips that would help you decide which graduation quote to use:
Avoid the very familiar quotes.
After graduation, you will always feel the emptiness of being alone. The sentimentality of memories makes them so memorable and bittersweet; it’s also why they can be such a cliché. You may find that your favourite quote had lost its meaning to you over time if it isn’t able to invoke the same emotions as when first heard years ago or doesn’t stop people from talking during your speech – then maybe this “quotation” really won’t change anything after all?
Some quotes are now clichés because their intended effect was never realized by our audiences anymore. We know these words have been repeated many times before without any changes in impactful messages. It gets more complicated for us to make an original statement with every passing
Choose only one or two graduation quotes
If you pack your speech with too many quotes, it will be difficult for the listener to remember because everything seems essential. It doesn’t mean that some parts of your address have less importance; instead, those are just illustrations and explanations so they can understand what is most critical in your main points more quickly.
Try to be original
When you have a sense of humour, your personally written speech will probably be filled with memorable lines that others will quote for their own speaking piece. Select only one or two appropriate graduation quotes from famous people, then craft the rest of your speech to take advantage of your mastery of language and understanding of your subject matter and human nature.
To do this, take careful observations of the situations you have created and try to find an unfamiliar reality. An example of this is how Gary Bolding injected humour in this realistic situation: “Your families are extremely proud of you. You can’t imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money.”
There is no rule on how to come up with statements like this. Your experiences will help you in this. Being natural is still the best way to go. They invited you to give the speech because they see your capability. Start with that.
Table of contents
Graduation Quotes 2021
- A graduation ceremony is when the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that “individuality” is the key to success. ~Robert Orben
- There is a good reason they call these ceremonies “commencement exercises.” Graduation is not the end; it’s the beginning. ~Orrin Hatch
- All that stands between the graduate and the top of the ladder is the ladder. ~Author Unknown
- Graduation is only a concept. In real life, every day, you graduate. Graduation is a process that goes on until the last day of your life. If you can grasp that, you’ll make a difference. ~Arie Pencovici
- When you leave here, don’t forget why you came. ~Adlai Stevenson, to college graduates
- Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed. ~Erma Bombeck
- It is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o’clock. ~Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates,” Side Effects, 1980
- People will frighten you about graduation… They use words you don’t often hear: “And we wish you Godspeed.” It is a warning, Godspeed. It means you are no longer welcome here at these prices. ~Bill Cosby
- Life is my college. May I graduate well and earn some honours! ~Louisa May Alcott
- Ironically, we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days. ~Isabel Waxman
- The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after. ~Newton D. Baker
- I learned law so well that I sued the college the day I graduated, won the case, and got my tuition back. ~Fred Allen
- The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate. ~Doug Larson
- Sooner or later, we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. ~Susan B. Anthony
Graduation Instagram Quotes
- “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” -The Buddha
- “I’m not young enough to know everything” -James Matthew Barrie
- “The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.” -Newton D. Baker
- “You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.” -Tom Brokaw
- “A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.” -Francis Bacon
- “Your families are extremely proud of you. You can’t imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money.” -Gary Bolding
- “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” -Les Brown
- “Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.” -Roger Babson
- “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” -Milton Berle
- “Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.” -Pearl S. Buck
- “Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed.” -Erma Bombeck “Education make a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive, easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” -Lord Brougham
- “The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.” -Newton D. Baker
Quotes For Graduation
- “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” -Confucius
- “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” -Winston Churchill
- “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” -e.e. cummings
- “The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.” -Dale Carnegie
- “Success doesn’t come to you…you go to it. ” -Marva Collins
- “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.” -George Washington Carver
- “The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.” -Arthur C. Clarke
- “The essential thing is not knowledge, but character.” -Joseph Le Conte
- “What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “Don’t worry about it, son. We are here for you.” -Ron Coleman
Inspirational Graduation Quotes
- “It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realized I’d become an actor.” -James D’arcy.
- “The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm.” -Fred Dehner.
- “All our dreams can come true…if we have the courage to pursue them.” -Walt Disney
- “The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.” -W. E B. Du Bois
- “The most important aspect of freedom of speech is the freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue — questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.” -William O. Douglas.
- “Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.” -Leonardo da Vinci.
- “A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.” -Bob Dylan.
Graduation Quotes Wishes
- “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” -Albert Einstein
- “There is just one life for each of us: our own.” -Euripides
- “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” -Albert Einstein
- “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.” -Clint Eastwood
- “The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life – mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.” -Julius Erving
Graduation Quotes To Friends
- “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” -Henry Ford
- “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” -Anatole France
- “The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.” -Henry Ford
- “My father always told me, Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” -Jim Fox
- “At commencement you wear your square-shaped mortarboards. My hope is that from time to time you will let your minds be bold, and wear sombreros.” -Paul Freund
- “Education is the process by which the individual relates himself to the universe, give himself citizenship in the changing world, share’s the race’s mind and enfranchises his own soul.” -John H. Finley
- “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “I think sleeping was my problem in school. If school had started at 4:00 in the afternoon, I’d be a college graduate today.” -George Foreman
- “The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means and the exercise of ordinary qualities. These may for the most part be summed in these two: common-sense and perseverance.” -Owen Feltham
- “Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.” -James A. Froude
- “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” -Henry Ford
Famous Graduation Quotes
- “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” -Sydney J. Harris
- “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” -Edmund Hillary
- “Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it – but sail we must, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” -Oliver Wendell Homes
- “The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions” -Oliver Wendell Homes
- “In football we always said that the other team couldn’t beat us. We had to be sure that we didn’t beat ourselves. And that’s what people have to do too, make sure they don’t beat themselves.” -Woody Hayes
- “Inspiration and genius–one and the same.” -Victor Hugo
- “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” -Lanston Hughes
- “The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.” -Thomas Huxley
- “The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” -Robert M. Hutchins
Good Graduation Quotes
- “I hire people brighter than me, and then I get out of their way.” -Lee Iacocca
- “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.” -Lee Iacocca
- “In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits.” -Lee Iacocca
- “No, I don’t believe in hard work. If something is hard, leave it. Let it come to you. Let it happen.” -Jeremy Irons
- “All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.” -Kazuo Ishiguro
- “The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.” -Robert G. Ingersoll
- “I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.” -Steve Irwin
The Best Graduation Quotes
- “The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things — the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.” -Samuel Johnson
- “The greatest discovery of any generation is that any human being can alter his life by altering his attitude” -William James
- “The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one. ” -William James
- “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” -William James
- ” Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” -Steve Jobs
- “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” -James Joyce
- “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” -Carl Gustav Jung
Graduation Messages For Son
It is a success you truly deserved.
It is an achievement you have truly earned.
I congratulate you on your academic success and wish you all the best for your future. Well done.
You genuinely deserve success, and with such efforts, you are sure to earn more.
Keep up the excellent work.
Happy Graduation.
Some are dreamers, and some are talented. You are both.
May you achieve more success ahead.
Congratulations on your graduation.
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